$88.5 million value to Frank Schilling’s domain portfolio — GoDaddy assigns

Firm assigns accounting value to Frank Schilling’s domain portfolio, which it purchased this year.

GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) has assigned an $88.5 million accounting value to the approximately 375,000 domain names it purchased from Frank Schilling this year.

The firm’s 10-Q filing with the SEC states:

The aggregate purchase price for the acquisitions completed during the three months ended March 31, 2020 was preliminarily allocated based upon our assessment of buyout-date fair values with $54.0 million allocated to goodwill, none of which is tax deductible, $88.5 million to domain portfolio indefinite-lived intangible assets, $15.8 million to other identified finite-lived intangible assets and $9.1 million of net liabilities assumed.

That means the accounting value is regarding $235 per domain name.

Firms have varying incentives for how they value things for accounting purposes.

Technically, GoDaddy purchased three businesses from Frank Schilling. GoDaddy also purchased Over in the first quarter, which obscures the total consideration paid to Schilling. The 10-Q states:

In February 2020, we completed two acquisitions for net cash purchase consideration of $149.2 million, of which $2.8 million is payable in future periods upon expiration of the contractual holdback period. One of the acquisitions was the first of a series of three related transactions, the latter two of which were completed in April 2020 for additional cash purchase consideration of $44.9 million, of which $1.4 million is payable in future periods upon expiration of the contractual holdback period. As the three related transactions were in contemplation of one another and formed a single transaction designed to achieve an overall commercial effect, they will be accounted for as a single business combination. The acquisitions were not material to our results of operations.